Design and evaluation of a cognitive approach for disseminating semantic knowledge and content in opportunistic networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cognitive heuristic-based approach for efficient dissemination of semantic knowledge and content in opportunistic networks, improving relevance and performance over traditional methods.

Contribution

It presents novel algorithms inspired by cognitive sciences for autonomous, lightweight dissemination of semantic data and content in opportunistic networks.

Findings

Superior semantic knowledge dissemination performance

Enhanced content relevance and tailoring

Effective in various network conditions

Abstract

In cyber-physical convergence scenarios information flows seamlessly between the physical and the cyber worlds. Here, users' mobile devices represent a natural bridge through which users process acquired information and perform actions. The sheer amount of data available in this context calls for novel, autonomous and lightweight data-filtering solutions, where only relevant information is finally presented to users. Moreover, in many real-world scenarios data is not categorised in predefined topics, but it is generally accompanied by semantic descriptions possibly describing users' interests. In these complex conditions, user devices should autonomously become aware not only of the existence of data in the network, but also of their semantic descriptions and correlations between them. To tackle these issues, we present a set of algorithms for knowledge and data dissemination in opportunistic networks, based on simple and very effective models (called cognitive heuristics) coming from cognitive sciences. We show how to exploit them to disseminate both semantic data and the corresponding data items. We provide a thorough performance analysis, under various different conditions comparing our results against non-cognitive solutions. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of our solution towards a more effective semantic knowledge acquisition and representation, and a more tailored content acquisition.